Saturday, April 09, 2005

From an interview by Ian Masters of Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan (Masters' questions are in bold):

"Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims - particularly the 16 words in the President's State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE - I'm not sure which one.

It was SISME, yeah. ...

[D]uring the two-thousands when we're talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn't that anyone had a good source on Iraq - there weren't any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...

I think I do, but I'd rather not speak about it right now, because I don't think it’s a proven case ...

If I said 'Michael Ledeen'?

You'd be very close . . ."

Produced in the United States, and very close to Michael Ledeen. This is consistent with my oldtheory that the documents are the work of Iraqi dissidents associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The documents would have flowed from Chalabi to Ledeen to SISME, and thus would have been laundered to make them appear as legitimate products discovered by a legitimate intelligence agency. This sophistication in the use of foreign intelligence agencies appears to be part of the modus operandi of the neocons, and may derive from the particular expertise of Ledeen and Perle, developed in various shenanigans going back to the 1970's (in particular, or course, Iran-Contra). Intelligence agencies in Britain, France, and Germany were also used in the same campaigns of lies which led to the attack on Iraq. One of the strategies was to feed some nonsense to one intelligence agency, and then have that nonsense distributed to other intelligence agencies. Then the claim would be that the information must be true, as it came from multiple sources.

The handling of the source of the main lies used to justify the attack, the aptly named 'Curveball', also displays the same sophistication in technique. Curveball was too obviously undependable to be sent directly to the CIA. As Joseph Cannon writes:

". . . the [Office of Special Plans] could feed lies directly into the Oval Office - but they needed more. They needed to find a way to make the CIA bestow its imprimatur onto this silliness. Thus, the neocons somehow arranged for Curveball to be routed through German intelligence - we don't yet know how it happened, but it happened. Why give this alky German minders? If the CIA had dealt with Curveball directly, they would have seen through his deceptions rather easily. But since the information came by way of the BND, the CIA tended to trust it. By the time the agency decided to take a closer look at the sourcing, war was already a done deal.

This little scheme offered a bonus: Since Tenet and McLaughlin had bought into the BND's information, when the shit finally hit the fan, responsibility could be laid to rest at the feet of the CIA. Not the OSP, not the INC, not the BND, not Mossad, not the neocon ideologues.

Once again, we see use of a bold tactic: The use of a foreign spy shop as a go-between, in order to legitimize and circulate bogus (but ideologically useful) data within the U.S. intelligence community. A similar history beset the yellowcake scandal and the infamous 'sixteen words.'"

If you feed Curveball's shoddy information through German intelligence, with no CIA experts allowed to see him, and ignore the German protestations that he could not be trusted, you can have the lies fed into the American system without any caveats about reliability. The added bonus is that by using the CIA to convey the information, you can then blame the CIA when the shit hits the fan. Perfect.

The common thread in the forged Niger documents, the use of Curveball, and the British intelligence manipulations which ended up getting David Kelly killed, is a very clever use of multiple intelligence agencies to disguise the source of a collection of rather obvious lies which were used to justify the attack on Iraq. Whoever was behind this had to have had a long history of involvement in American government and involvement with multiple foreign intelligence agencies. There aren't that many people with that kind of experience. Who was: 1) a neocon in favor of an attack on Iraq; with 2) connections to Feith's Office of Special Plans; and with 3) ties to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress; and with 4) long-standing documented relationships with foreign intelligence agencies, particularly SISME? At some point, Americans might want to find this guy and ask him why he decided to do such damage to the United States.